DIY Displacement Sensor (Displacement Strain Gage)

Displacement – the change in distance between two points of a body caused by an external agent (e.g. force or heat); normally 1-dimensional.

A Displacement Sensor (DS) based on a full bridge foil strain gage is a device that measures the distance between the DS and a subject by sensing the amount of displacement through a variety of elements and converting it into a distance using a Data Acquisition Systems.

The DS that was designed and built by Vijay measures and detects very small changes (= displacement) in a physical quantity. This r displacement sensor has units of millimeters (mm) or inches (in.)

The laws of Newtonian physics go hand-in-hand with engineering. The relationship between a falling apple and earth is well known. The concepts of displacement and velocity and acceleration are defined precisely with the calculus invented (by Newton, if not Leibnitz) for that purpose. Computers, large and small, based on artificial intelligence (AI) can crunch vast numbers of stress analysis calculations with incomprehensible speed and accuracy.

Great technical libraries are filled with books, periodicals, standards, codes and reports of every kind that document our knowledge

Yet earthquakes sometimes crumble the structures we so carefully design. Airplanes can fall inexplicably from the sky. And, only the foolhardy engineer would dare predict exactly when apple and earth will collide. Have we failed as scientists and engineers? Not at all! Apples just ain’t completely round.

Nature appears to be a complex amalgam of simple things bound by an equally simple set of rules inviolate. Science seeks to quantify these rules through observations of the interactions between these basic components in isolated system. Unfortunately, when left on their own without the constraints of experimental controls, the system can quickly become complicated. The fall of the apple, dictated primarily by the action of gravity, is affected by the environment through which it passes.